In a performance at Cabrillo College, guest composer Mark Kilstofte’s Ballistic Etude 3.1 will run riot across six members of the NMW Ensemble. The seven-minute piece, in the form of a “hunting” ritornello, paints a now-frantic, now-darkly-insinuating film noir image while its hero attempts to rescue his girl from evil clutches.

Téa Obreht’s first novel had not even been published when she was named one of the 20 best writers under 40 by the New Yorker at the tender age of 24. Those squirrelly Manhattanites were on to something, though—upon its publication nearly a year later, The Tiger’s Wife scooped up the Orange Prize for Fiction and was named a finalist for the National Book Award.

Neuroscience has not been kind to the concept of free will. In recent years, the field has given us a picture of the conscious mind that isn’t very flattering—it often looks to be quite an underachiever compared to the unconscious mind, and it’s also disturbingly willing to take credit for work it didn’t do.

When The Devil Makes Three got its start 10 years ago playing old-timey country folk with the intense live show energy and DIY philosophy of a punk band, it was ahead of its time. Since then, acoustic bands with a punk ethos have sprouted up all over Santa Cruz, giving banjos and tattoos common cause.

Coming out of the Art Deco darkness of the Del Mar after the late show I note it is past midnight and Pacific Avenue looks oddly twisted, the street wiggled down to one lane curling snakelike among dense foliage like the old Garden Mall and, amazingly, it is.

Not everything went well for Mom on this holiday trip out West. First there was the missed flight, and then there was the other missed flight, and then the fellow passenger who blabbed all the way to Chicago. But Saturday night at the Cabrillo Crocker Theater, things started to look up. That’s when the four stars of Plaid Tidings launched into “Strangers in Paradise,” followed closely by “Sh–Boom,” “Mambo Italiano” and a slew of jazzed-up holiday numbers as only a quartet of clean-cut fraternity brothers from 1950s middle America could perform them.

Ah, Nevermind. Although the Pixies’ Trompe le Monde, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ BloodSugarSexMagik and A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory were all released on the same day in 1991 as Nirvana’s breakthrough album, only Nevermind received the 20th-anniversary box-set treatment this year.